Robert Grimshaw è un gentiluomo inglese, ha trentacinque anni ed è fidanzato con sua cugina Katia Lascarides. Alla morte dei genitori di lei, la ragazza scopre che i due non si erano mai sposati. Per questo il fidanzamento con Robert viene sciolto: Katia vorrebbe vivere con lui senza alcun vincolo matrimoniale, cosa inaccettabile per Robert. Dopo alcuni anni Robert si innamora di Pauline Lucas, ma continua a pensare a Katia, sperando che lei cambi idea e accetti di sposarlo. Per questo decide di spingere Pauline a sposare Dudley Leicester, suo migliore amico. Dudley, partecipando a una cena, incontra una sua vecchia fiamma, Etta Stackpole. La riaccompagna a casa e mentre si trova lì, squilla il telefono. È Dudley a rispondere, fingendosi il domestico: l'uomo all'altro capo del telefono però riconosce la sua voce. La telefonata getta Dudley nel panico più completo. Il pericolo di uno scandalo che comprometta il suo rapporto con Pauline è vicinissimo. Cercando di scoprire l'autore della telefonata, Dudley si logora fino a scivolare in uno stato catatonico. E mentre Robert e Pauline si scoprono sempre più vicini e legati, Katia riappare e spezza questo idillio.

Ford Madox Ford's masterpiece, a tetralogy set in England during World War I, is widely considered one of the best novels of the twentieth century. 

   First published as four separate novels (Some Do Not . . ., No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up—, and The Last Post) between 1924 and 1928, Parade's End explores the world of the English ruling class as it descends into the chaos of war. Christopher Tietjens is an officer from a wealthy family who finds himself torn between his unfaithful socialite wife, Sylvia, and his suffragette mistress, Valentine. A profound portrait of one man's internal struggles during a time of brutal world conflict, Parade's End bears out Graham Greene's prediction that “There is no novelist of this century more likely to live than Ford Madox Ford.”

È questo il grande segreto, il cuore della mia confessione. La distanza non contava. Nessun muro poteva mettermi al sicuro, né solitudine difendermi, e, non riponendo fede nella consolazione dell'eternità, soffrivo troppo per la tua crudele assenza.

Ford Madox Ford’s novel about the doomed Katharine Howard, fifth queen of Henry VIII, is a neglected masterpiece.

Kat Howard—intelligent, beautiful, naively outspoken, and passionately idealistic—catches the eye of Henry VIII and improbably becomes his fifth wife. A teenager who has grown up far from court, she is wholly unused to the corruption and intrigue that now surround her. It is a time of great upheaval, as unscrupulous courtiers maneuver for power while religious fanatics—both Protestant and Catholic—fight bitterly for their competing beliefs. Soon Katharine is drawn into a perilous showdown with Thomas Cromwell, the much-feared Lord Privy Seal, as her growing influence over the King begins to threaten too many powerful interests. Originally published in three parts (The Fifth Queen, Privy Seal, and The Fifth Queen Crowned), Ford’s novel serves up both a breathtakingly visual evocation of the Tudor world and a timeless portrayal of the insidious operations of power and fear in any era.

The second volume of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End series, this fully annotated edition follows Christopher Tietjens, an officer and gentlemen, from the secure, orderly world of Edwardian England into the chaotic madness of World War I. Recounting a complex sexual intrigue involving Tietjens and his faithless wife Sylvia, this account is not only a panorama of WWI, but an exploration of time, history, and sexuality. The text also provides key contexts?such as Ford's biography, the historical moment, the novel's reception at the time of its original publication, and its relation to the author's other novels?giving readers a close-up view of this major literary technician at work. Transcripts of significant deletions and revisions to the work as well as a glossary of pertinent terms are also included.

Granger è uno scrittore fallito che finalmente ha l'opportunità di sfondare. Per farlo deve però tradire i propri ideali e vendersi al volere degli editori e degli eminenti personaggi che inizia controvoglia a frequentare. In questa nuova vita incrocia di continuo una donna bellissima, un essere misterioso che gli confessa di venire dalla Quarta Dimensione e gli preannuncia che lei e i suoi simili stanno per conquistare la Terra. Granger, armato solo del suo talento e mosso soprattutto dall'amore, si ritrova coinvolto in un gioco troppo grande per lui, incerto se credere o non credere a tutti i segreti di cui viene a conoscenza, e in definitiva incapace di decidere da che parte stare.

During a Christmas leave in London, Ford Madox Ford attended a party at the French Embassy, 'a heavy blond man in a faded uniform,' wearied by years of war, recalled to a longing for the life of a writer. The evening marks the beginning of a new phase of Ford's life, the years of It Was the Nightingale.
Ford evokes the literary milieux of London, Paris and New York between the wars with sparkle, wit and energy. Recollections range across time in a subtle and flexible narrative that fuses fiction and memoir. A memory of a dark January day in Paris, in the weeks 'between dog and wolf,' when Ford read the news of the death of the novelist John Galsworthy, triggers an exploration of the transition from an entire pre-war world: a ghost had passes, writes Ford, and Nancy Cunard steps forward 'like a jeweled tropical bird.' Here is James Joyce, whom Ford found dull company with his 'thin little jokes'; Ezra Pound playing Provencal songs on the bassoon; Gertrude Stein driving through the streets of Paris with the solemn 'snail-like precision' of a Pharaoh. Behind the vivacity other ghosts, too, are always present: men killed and damaged in the war, mental breakdown and betrayal, out of which Ford was to create his best-loved novel, Parade's End.

The Dowells, a wealthy American couple, have been close friends with the Ashburnhams for years. Edward Ashburnham, a first-rate soldier, seems to be the perfect English gentleman, and Leonora his perfect wife, but beneath the surface their marriage seethes with unhappiness and deception. This is a novel of passion and betrayal.

Presents four novels which tell the terrifying story of a good man tortured, pursued, driven into revolt, and ruined as far as the world is concerned by the clever devices of a jealous and lying wife. Christopher Tietjens is the last of a breed, the Tory gentleman, which the Great War, and the qualities inherent in his nature define and unravel.

 
Handsome, wealthy, and a veteran of service in India, Captain Edward Ashburnham appears to be the ideal “good soldier” and the embodiment of English upper-class virtues. But for his creator, Ford Madox Ford, he also represents the corruption at society’s core. Beneath Ashburnham’s charming, polished exterior lurks a soul well-versed in the arts of deception, hypocrisy, and betrayal. Throughout the nine years of his friendship with an equally privileged American, John Dowell, Ashburnham has been having an affair with Dowell’s wife, Florence. Unlike Dowell, Ashburnham’s own wife, Leonora, is well aware of it.

When The Good Soldier was first published in 1915, its pitiless portrait of an amoral society dedicated to its own pleasure and convinced of its own superiority outraged many readers. Stylistically daring, The Good Soldier is narrated, unreliably, by the naïve Dowell, through whom Ford provides a level of bitter irony. Dowell’s disjointed, stumbling storytelling not only subverts linear temporality to satisfying effect, it also reflects his struggle to accept a world without honor, order, or permanence. Called the best French novel in the English language, The Good Soldier is both tragic and darkly comic, and it established Ford as an important contributor to the development of literary modernism.

Frank Kermode has taught at Manchester, London, and Cambridge Universities as well as at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia. Among his many books the most recent are Shakespeare’s Language, Pieces of My Mind, and The Age of Shakespeare.

This 900-page survey of world literature, "From Confucius' Day to Our Own" (as the subtitle reads), was the last book written by Ford Madox Ford, one of the seminal figures of the modernist period. Written for general readers rather than scholars and first published in 1938, The March of Literature is a working novelist's view of what is valuable in literature, and why. Convinced that scholars and teachers give a false sense of literature, Ford brings alive the pleasures of reading by writing about books he is passionate about.
Beginning at the beginning - with ancient Egyptian and Chinese literature and the Bible - Ford works his way through classical literature, the writings of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, continuing up to the major writers of his own day like Ezra Pound, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad.
With his encyclopedic reading and expertise in the techniques of writing, Ford is a reliable and entertaining guide. Ford also includes a chapter on publishers and booksellers, noting the key roles they play in literature's existence.
Novelist Alexander Theroux (Darconville's Cat, An Adultery) has written an insightful introduction for this reissue, the first time this monumental book has been made available in paperback.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

 

Introduction by Malcolm Bradbury

(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)

Ford Madox Ford wrote The Good Soldier, the book on which his reputation most surely rests, in deliberate emulation of the nineteenth-century French novels he so admired. In this way he was able to explore the theme of sexual betrayal and its poisonous after-effects with a psychological intimacy as yet unknown in the English novel.